On Indie Making

For about six years I told myself I was going to build my own products. Not someday—properly, with intention.

I had the ideas. I had the skills. I had a folder full of half-started Figma files and GitHub repositories.

What I didn’t have was anything shipped.

I could make the list of reasons sound reasonable. Client work, placements, family life. The kind of life that has legitimate demands on it.

But the honest version is shorter and less flattering: I just didn’t do it.

The work was always about to start. The conditions were never quite right. The idea wasn’t good enough, or some other app had just launched and solved the problem. All excuses.

I discovered the indie maker movement around 2019. People building small products, shipping them, building in public, some of them making a living from it.

I found it inspiring and wanted to do the same, but inspiration without output is only a longer way of standing still. So I stood still.

There was surfing too. Every time I’d find the motivation to sit down and build something, one session would flip the switch. After that the only thing I wanted was more of it—more time in the water, more time on the beach, all day if possible.

It’s a sweet life, but in my early thirties with things to prove, financially and professionally, it wasn’t the right time to live like that forever. So I moved to the city. No coast, no daily excuse, with the focus, finally being on building the shipping muscle memory.

The muscle’s slowly growing.

A few Figma plugins shipped, tools I built for myself first.

A design system in progress that means I don’t rethink the basics on every new idea.

A networked thought app in the pipeline—yes, another one, I know—because I’ve never found one that fits the way I actually think. Every few months I’d migrate everything to a new app, reorganise, start fresh. Shiny object syndrome, partly, but also a genuine gap. Building your own is the honest solution to that.

The thing I’m most worried about isn’t shipping. That habit is building. What I’m worried about is shipping half-baked work, because it’s never been easier to do exactly that.

Since the latest models improved I have about fifteen projects started and half-built.

The speed is real—you can have an idea and see it take shape in hours. But the bottlenecks that were always there are still there.

The last twenty percent still takes the most time. It still doesn’t feel right until it does. Maybe that part was never about the tools.

A lot of people say the moat now is taste and restraint. I agree, partly. But that was always the moat—between something that works and something that doesn’t, between something that sells and something that doesn’t. Nothing new there.

What I think is actually changing is this: large companies are shipping AI features because the capital is already in, not because anyone asked for them. It feels like the return to office argument—confident on the surface, thin underneath.

The opportunity that opens up for small builders is real.

I’m talking the talk. I want to walk it too.